Does anyone know what’s going on with Ethereum this week?

If you somehow aren’t plugged into the cryptocurrency trading market, the price of blockchain currency Ether (ETH) has swung wildly, with intraday gains and losses of 30 percent. Last week there was a crash of the trading platform Coinbase which brought the price to $0.10 briefly, before it rebounded to over $300. This crash also brought the cryptocurrency from an internet fringe into the newsfeeds of Facebook and LinkedIn and onto the pages of the Wall Street Journal.

“Natural market cycles. Those that have been in crypto for years are used to these types of behavior. When ETH goes up dramatically a dramatic correction isn’t surprising. It was at 10 dollars at the beginning of the year. It will go down for now as people take profits. Then when summer ends, and the Metropolis upgrade comes around and then Devcon, it will go back up.”

The platform cannot scale no matter what anyone says right now. That’s why Coinbase has continually been down over the last few weeks. The proof of stake consensus protocol is still 12 months out and so the scalability issue does not seem to be solved anytime soon. That means transactions will go at the normal ethereum rate of 4-7 tx/second.”

“The price of Ether is fluctuating, which is normal for a volatile cryptocurrency. Ether’s daily volatility is around 7%, so a drop of 40% ($350 => $250) is statistically just about 5.7 days in the life of Ether, which has been in production for just under 2 years or so.

Advertisement

It’s going to continue fluctuating with high volatility until (a) it gains more liquidity, participants, and stability, and/or (b) it begins to reflect the fundamentals of revenue-generating projects being built on top of Ethereum.”

“These markets are volatile especially when you look week by week. ETH is at the same price as it was at the start of the month and up 400% since 3 months ago. The massive rise this year is a combination of many factors but the EEA is likely the main cause.”